The present research program will examine the involvement of the gustatory cortex in the mediation of the rat's hedonic and associative response to alcohol solutions. Normal rats and rats with gustatory cortex ablations will be given preference tests with various concentrations of alcohol under several experimental conditions to determine if the normal acceptance-rejection of alcohol solutions is affected by cortical damage. Preliminary data suggest that rats sustaining taste cortex damage drink more of strong alcohol concentrations than do normal rats. Further, alcohol will be used as a conditioned stimulus in a taste aversion learning paradigm; normal rats and rats lacking gustatory cortex will be trained to avoid drinking alcohol by pairing the alcohol solution with drug-induced illness. The effect of gustatory neocortex ablations on preoperatively-learned alcohol aversions also will be tested. With basic tastes (e.g. salt), rats with taste cortex ablations fail to learn or retain conditioned taste aversions in a normal manner. The present studies will determine if the same pattern of deficits is found in rats lacking taste cortex when alcohol is used as a tastant. It is hypothesized that the rat lacking taste cortex will exhibit an increased preference for strong alcohol solutions and that it will fail to learn or retain an alcohol aversion. Such a pattern of results would suggest that the neural encoding of alcohol is similar to that of other tastes (at least at a cortical level). Because consumption of alcohol represents a serious health problem, study of the neural mechanisms which influence drinking behavior is important and may provide insight to methods for the eventual modification of alcohol consumption.